Thursday, August 7, 2014

Throwback Thursday Review: THE FORGIVEN, by Lawrence Osborne

The Forgiven, by Lawrence Osborne. Published 2012 by Hogarth Press. ISBN 978-0307889034.

I think I need to read everything Hogarth Press publishes.

Hogarth is a new imprint of Random House, named after the press founded
in 1917 by Virginia Woolf and Leonard Woolf. Our Hogarth Press is a new
home for edgy, voice-driven fiction, and it produces about four titles a
season. I've read three Hogarth titles now and each has been
outstanding in its own way. The Watch, by Joydeep Roy-Bhattacharya, was a brilliant indictment of the war in Afghanistan; The Dead Do Not Improve, by Jay Caspian Kang, was a comic crime novel set in San Francisco among hipsters, gangbangers and surfers, and now there's The Forgiven, a searing, atmospheric story of lust and death in the Moroccan desert.

David and Jo Henninger are a wealthy British couple on their way to a
weekend bacchanal at a lavish estate; Richard and Dally, their hosts,
spare no expense to give their friends a getaway filled with bountiful
meals, free-flowing wine, and sex, and drugs, and whatever else they
want. But David has had too much to drink and the couple gets lost on
the way. They hit and kill a young Moroccan man named Driss, who may or
may not have wished them ill, but who is, nonetheless, very dead. David
and Jo arrive at the party with the young man's corpse in tow. Richard
and Dally and their servant Hamid wait to see what will happen next,
which is that Driss's father shows up and makes David an offer he can't
refuse.

In the mean time, the narrative alternates between the party and Driss's
short life, including his adventures in France, which story may or may
not be true. Osborne, a travel writer, excels at creating atmosphere and
mood; the plot is enough to keep you going but it isn't really the
point. What's interesting to watch is the way the characters develop,
the way each reacts to the crisis and how the grow and change. The
characters' interactions and reactions to each other make up so much of
the action, their prehistoric prejudices collapsed
into modern day post-colonialism and post-9/11 anxiety. The Moroccans in
the book make their living selling fossils, the
characters' attitudes towards each other as old and as integral to
who they are as the ammonites and trilobites they buy and sell. Both
sides are stained to the marrow with hostility and hatred; neither side
can do anything to please the other, except, maybe, the one thing David
refuses to do.

So, I loved it. Even though the plot is far from razor-sharp, I was
riveted to this book which manages to be both slow to savor and quick to
read. It's intoxicating and langorous but at the same time I really wanted to know what was going to happen.
The answer, which doesn't come till the final line, is devastating. I
strongly- strongly- recommend this to literary fiction readers and
anyone else who would enjoy gorgeous armchair travel combined with a
haunting, and haunted, narrative of lost souls.